Wherefore God also delays bringing about the confusion and dissolution of the whole world, so that the wicked angels and demons and men may no longer exist, on account of the seed of the Christians, which he knows in nature to be the cause of preservation. For if it were not for this, it would not even be possible for you any longer to do these things and to be energized by the wicked demons, but the fire of judgment would come down and dissolve all things without restraint, just as formerly the flood left no one except him alone with his household—the one called among us Noah, and among you Deucalion—from whom again so many came into being, of whom some are wicked and some are good. For thus we say the conflagration will come about, but not, as the Stoics say, according to the doctrine that all things change into one another, which appeared most shameful; nor do men act or suffer what happens according to fate, but each one does right or sins according to his free choice, and it is by the energy of the wicked demons that the earnest, such as Socrates and the like, are persecuted and put in bonds, while a Sardanapalus and an Epicurus and the like seem to be happy in abundance and glory. Not understanding this, the Stoics declared that all things come about according to the necessity of fate. But since God made the race both of angels and of men free from the beginning, they will justly receive the punishment in eternal fire for whatever they have transgressed. And this is the nature of everything created, that it is capable of vice and virtue; for none of them would be praiseworthy if it did not have the power to turn in either direction. And this is shown also by the men everywhere who have legislated and philosophized according to right reason, from their enjoining to do certain things and to abstain from others. And the Stoic philosophers too, in their treatise on morals, strongly honor the same things, so that it becomes evident that in their treatise on first principles and incorporeal things they do not fare well. For if they will say either that what happens among men comes about according to fate, or that there is no God except things turning and altering and being resolved into the same things forever, they will be shown to have grasped only corruptible things, and that God himself, both through his parts and through the whole, comes to be in every vice—or else that there is no vice nor virtue; which is contrary to every sound notion and reason and mind.